\chapter{Non-functional Requirements}

\section{Performance}
The application shall provide fast and uninterrupted access to Systems Design
students throughout an academic term. To ensure maximal service availability the
application shall accommodate 200 concurrent users, the maximum expected class
size of two full Systems Design Engineering classes. As well, the application
will also provide page-load times of under 1 second for 95\% of all operations.

\section{Maintainability}
To ensure a high degree of maintainability, the application shall be written
atop the Ruby on Rails web application framework. It is assumed that Ruby on
Rails is a well known platform, allowing other administrators or stake holders
in the Systems Department to extend or modify the application as the
department's needs change over time.

\section{Hardware Platform}
The application shall run atop the Java VM by means of the JRuby interpreter,
allowing the application to run on any platform with Java support. Supported
platforms shall include: i386 and PowerPC.

\section{Supporting Software}
The application shall be operating-system independent by virtue of targeting the Java
VM. The application shall run on: Microsoft Windows, Ubuntu Linux and Mac OS X.
As well, the application shall require a relational database system, such as:
MySQL, PostgreSQL or SQLite.
